The e-platform of National Agriculture Market (eNAM), or digital market place for farmers, which was launched by PM Narendra Modi last year, has made a sluggish start with only 250 mandis in 10 states carrying out online trading within their Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) yard rather than going for intra-state trade.
In the absence of reforms to allow inter-state trade, NAM so far achieved little in terms of multiplying the farmers’ choice of buyers. Let alone inter-state trade, the electronic market place hasn’t even allowed farmers to sell their produce to far-away mandis in their own states.
Sources told FE that only the Haryana government has recently launched a trial run for connecting 37 mandis registered with eNAM for allowing farmers to sell their produce to any buyers inside the state.
Since its formal launch last year, around 9 lakh farmers of an estimated 14 crore in the country have registered with eNAM which has witnessed a trade turnover of only around R8,000 crore so far.
The annual trade volume of all mandis across the country is estimated at Rs 6 lakh crore. Only 250 regulated wholesale markets – spread across 10 states including Gujarat, UP, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, and Rajasthan – under the respective APMCs have so far been integrated with the NAM platform, while the country has a total of 585 such mandis.
However, an agriculture ministry official said that mandis are currently experimenting with viability of such markets and within a couple of months, more traders, agents and farmers would join the pan-India platform. The official also said that for assaying of commodities for trading on eNAM, common tradable parameters have been developed for 69 commodities.
Around 59,000 traders and 31,000 commission agents have got registered with NAM. However, even among these NAM-linked markets, electronic trade is limited to a few commodities – in most markets just one or two items.
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As many as 18 states including Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh have fully or partially modified their APMC laws for allowing electronic trade within the mandi premises.
